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Alina Stefanescu

At Inappropriate Hour

We are watching that show about the psychic and all I can think is how lovely the way her front teeth overlap in two places and how esemplastic all intergalactic hinges because I like her teeth and hope stardust will solve her work-life balance in pixels. That one child might inherit hypnotic snaggle-teeth. /// All I can think is children not ready for school in less than four hours no lunches yet packed and your snore never settles into an earnest jazz-club clutter but always this jagged shaft coming up /// rattle stroke out rest /// always this uneven paddle when we canoe. I think who said the bed is a boat. Maybe they were married to you. ///// The psychic heroine pretends to look tired with that extravagant yawn since bags below the eyes are impermissible forms of carry-on luggage for females at security check points haggard leaves one stranded yet all I can think is how I promised tonight would not find me awake at the hour when Steve has gone silent. /////// Steve has gone silent anyway Steve is an unlikely name for the barred owl who nests in the tree near our bedroom window but what could you expect me to call a creature who foretells our deaths every night for the past seven months one of us will die in the morning eating all the Raisin Bran we have left without milk I forgot // All I can think is how a promise might be less than an omen as a toothache is less than a broken jaw as a head circles the room without one single landing strip in sight all I can think is how perhaps you are a better person at the end of the day when all is counted you close your eyes and become a shepherd while I scan the foreground for what comes next as if it can’t come come home without me watching as if I am some pretty tv-show psychic who looks sexy when she yawns and yawns and yawns and ///// I am the liar who lives in her head / let’s call it a day, let’s call it a bed / but promises to be there when you need me brewing coffee and muffins with bacon. /// All I can think is three nights in a row and this psychic show but nothing ever happens. Not yet.

In the Car I Savor Scars

It no longer excites me to drive without a seatbelt. Old yearnings fall off like patches or sun-baked scabs; wounds of former-wanteds neatly shut; little scars with lips seamed tight; a line of children saying they didn’t do it.

A line is a list of body parts waiting: an elbow speckled by silver scar coinage; knee covered skid marks, standard staples; palm you can’t read given the white lines scrawled over original fortune.

It no longer excites to be reckless and so I sit behind a song for whom bass is a scabbard and don’t even consider plastic surgery. Don’t permit a revision of history to make people feel better. To say no one got hurt. Don’t allow what has been dodge-balled to dislocate the scar’s merely-decent dazzle.

Car radios sing about love and bitches and oft-blandished objects. || A burgeon of limpid-cowboy-bathos. || A busybody-bunting of better-business-bureauing. || See how the words get sewn together. || See how the story piles up. ||| See my scars, my streetwalking versions of shameless self, each step slurring skin and good paper. |||||||

These scars must be savored, I announce to the duck crossing which keeps us from flying. And have you seen me nude with nothing but a blacklight? Have you seen what a blacklight does to my body? Oh, you would never stop looking.

We Are Not What They See We Are

To leave a look behind is to be seen forever. Long-lasting looks which others hold against us as evidence of the character who shares our name. Lookey-there looks. Here-comes-cookie looks, We are not what they say. Nevertheless, we are something they have seen and confirmed in a look. The family-portrait pout we wish we could take back for all the explaining required every Christmas. The pout that makes us look bad at funerals when what we want to look is sorry and mournful. The contemptuous teenaging look which repudiates our claims to having been angst-free and well-behaved throughout. The unhappy camper look that demolishes our reputation as profound and somewhat sensitive nature-lovers. The girl of the wild in doubt. We want to be pixies but the look is not a pixie look. Devise anodynes instead, correction of original bad choice. Knowing better now, this era of anodyne-paradigms pocked upon our model houses. We snap eons of selfies to repudiate the looks they say define us. We post selfies everywhere. Post and post and post until our faces freeze into selfies. Then pre-selfie faces and post-selfie faces. It doesn’t take long for expectant-selfie faces to emerge. We are shameless selfie-faced. Two-faced is not enough for us. Two-faced is a trap and we want more than two faces to the three-dimensional human form. We are not what they see we are in that look they save. The look is a corpse in which they bury us. Even if they bring flowers we say it’s still a corpse and we won’t be part of it. We improvise solutions. Snapshitshot.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama with her partner and four small mammals. A Pushcart nominee, she is the author of Objects In Vases (Anchor & Plume, March 2016), Letters to Arthur (Beard of Bees, August 2016), and Ipokimen (Anchor and Plume, November 2016). Her first fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the 2016 Brighthorse Books Prize. She can’t wait for you to read it. More online at alinastefanescu.com.

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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the editor of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom, winner of the 2017 Washington Prize, Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in such places as The Awl, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Cimarron, Gargoyle, The Journal, New American Writing, The New Orleans Review, Prelude, Raritan, Seneca Review, So to Speak, Verse, Verse Daily, and VOLT.